olc's picture

What are the real practical advantages of running VMWARE Tools on a VM on a ESX system?

I'm asking this question because I saw that TKL 11 has those tools already installed. Our VM doesnt have them (TKL LAMP Ubuntu server 8.04) and we never installed them.

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Jeremy Davis's picture

A quick google found this blog post which should answer you question in a general way. If you want to clarify specifics post back and hopefully one of the devs will be able to give you a more TKL-centric answer.

Dan Robertson's picture

Some of the main advantages are:

  • Network card drivers for better performance
  • Better time syncronization between the guest and host
  • Allows you to shutdown/reboot the guest cleanly
  • Better video/mouse performance while using the console (more important for graphical desktops)
olc's picture

thanks for your answer. i have used vmware for desktop before so i do undertand the need for better gfx an mouse driver... so far, only "Network card drivers for better performance" interests me (we're talking nox server here) but i found nothing conclusive on google or on tkl forum.

Dan Robertson's picture

You may also need VMware Tools installed if you want to shrink virtual disks prior to packaging an appliance.

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_disk_shrink.html

Also found the following link that provides a little more insight.  http://communities.vmware.com/thread/182065

olc's picture

thanks, very instructive.

Daniel Gross's picture

The tools also seem to allow better monitoring of the machine's status in Veeam monitor as well as properly allowing growth/shrink of the resources with thin provisioning, do they not? Since many of these appliances are fairly quiet in my setting, we well overprovision them, and mix them with traditional Windows servers on the same host, so this seems important to me.

Mohd Fitri Abd Rahman's picture

im already install the vmware-tool , the only one problem.. i can't have a IPv6 network after installing.. anybody have the same problem ?

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